Mary, our Mother

Third Sunday of Easter + Year A (RCL)

Mother’s Day 2011

Happy Mother’s Day! Let us keep all mothers, including our own, in our prayers in a special way today.

In looking for theology that applies to this day, we turn to the First Letter of Peter, which is our second lesson this morning. Peter begins his letter with a solemn proclamation: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” [I Peter 1:3]

Peter goes on to remind his audience (Christians living in present-day Greece and Turkey) of what they have been taught about Jesus: “Although you have not seen^* him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” [I Peter 1:8-9]

This is the essence of the faith that Peter preached, and it is certainly central to our Christian faith today. Therefore, it is hard to imagine that there were disagreements for the first five hundred years about exactly who and what Jesus was.

The earliest Christians were people who had known or seen Jesus personally. They were focused on the wonders that he performed, the words of hope and reconciliation that he had preached, and especially on his suffering, death, and resurrection.

Later generations of Christians, people who had not had personal contact with Jesus, began to ask for more information and a better understanding of his true nature. And that’s where the problems began.

The Gospel of Mark begins, “…the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” [Mark 1:1] Matthew begins by calling Jesus, “the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” [Matthew 1:1] Luke tells Mary that her son will be “called the Son of the Most High.” [Luke 1:32] But it is John who most clearly lays out the faith of Christians: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” [John 1:1] John says it clearly: Jesus is God. Not merely the Son of God, the Messiah, but actually God. From that simple statement comes a long controversy that is not fully resolved, even today.

How could Jesus be God and also human? Even if we accept those words, how did it actually work? Did Jesus know that he was God? Did he give up his godly powers when he became a human being? The words are simple; understanding how this is possible and how it actually is true represents a challenge.

During the times of the persecutions of Christians, theology took a back seat. Survival was more important. However, once the Roman Empire recognized Christianity as a legal religion in the year 313 [Edict of Milan], and even more as Christianity quickly became the largest, and then the official, religion in the Empire, theological questions came to the forefront.

So, how did these early Christians answer the question: what does it mean to say that Jesus Christ is both God and man? As with any theological question, there were many answers, often in direct conflict with each other.

One early idea was that Jesus only “seemed” to be human. He was never really anything but God. This philosophy came from a belief that human flesh is evil, and therefore God could never take on real human nature. The result of this kind of thinking was that Jesus’ crucifixion was then only an act. Since Jesus did not have a real human body, he did not really feel pain, and did not really die. It may seem surprising to us today that some early Christians actually believed this, but it is true.

Another early theory was that Jesus started out in life as an ordinary human, not divine at all. He was only “adopted” by God as God’s Son and the Messiah of the Jews. This adoption was said to have taken place at the moment when Jesus was baptized by John in the River Jordan. It may even be true that some of the people who saw and knew Jesus had this idea – that he was a man chosen by God, but still only a man. We only need to read some of the gospels to notice the contradictory phrases, “Jesus was raised from the dead,” and “Jesus rose from the dead.” [Compare Matthew 17:9 and Acts 10:14] One expression seems to make the resurrection something that Jesus himself did, while the other seems to say that it is something that God did to Jesus.

Both of these early explanations―that Jesus only appeared to be human, and that he was an ordinary man adopted as God’s Son―were rejected formally by the theology of the Nicene Creed, which we will profess in a few minutes. But that didn’t end the controversy.

The Council of Nicaea [325 AD] and its creed clearly state that Jesus had two “natures” – human and divine, but the council did not say any more than that, leaving open the question of how these two natures existed together and interacted.

One early bishop, Nestorius, went so far as to claim that the divine and human natures of Christ both existed as separate entities, inside one human body. Rather than believing that the man who walked the roads of Galilee was both human and divine at the same time, Nestorius’ followers believed that the divine Jesus inhabited the body of the human Jesus, but that they were always two separate beings. After one of the early Church Councils [First Council of Ephesus, 431 AD] rejected this idea, Nestorius and his followers left the Christian Church and carried on their beliefs for centuries. Some of their ideas still crop up today.

One more attempted explanation of the divinity and humanity of Jesus went to another extreme. Eutyches, a church leader in Constantinople, believed that divinity was so much more important and powerful than humanity that he felt that Jesus as a man simply stopped doing anything. He became a sort of “divine robot,” only acknowledging and manifesting his divine nature. While Jesus was still clearly a man (he ate and slept and felt pain when he died), his human body was completely taken over by his divine side. This belief was also rejected by a church council, Chalcedon, in 451.

Today, you and I probably give very little thought to how Jesus is both human and divine. We have had the Nicene Creed for more than 1600 years. We just accept the reality, without questioning it, and we trust that God knows how it works and will reveal it to us when we see Jesus face to face.

I have presented all this history today for a reason, and it’s related to this Mother’s Day. That same Council of Chalcedon, which declared that Christ was human and divine, and that both natures existed equally at the same time in him, went a step further.

Being human, Jesus had to be born of a human mother. Luke tells us how an angel appeared to Miriam, or Mary, of Nazareth, and announced that she would give birth to the Son of the Most High. When Mary asked how this could happen, since she was not married and did not have relations with a man, the angel explained that it would happen through the action of the Holy Spirit.

A modern-day atheist might point out a perceived flaw in this idea. If Jesus did not have an earthly father, where did he get the Y chromosome that made him a male baby, since Mary could only contribute X, or female, chromosomes? Our answer to smart-aleck atheists is to remind them that Luke writes that “the power of the Most High” was to overshadow Mary. [Luke 1:35] The same God who created everything out of nothing could easily supply a little thing like a Y chromosome for the divine Son.

Thus, Mary became a special person, the mother of Jesus, the human baby born to her, and also the mother of Jesus, the divine man who taught and preached and died on the cross and rose from the dead. The Council of Chalcedon struggled almost as much with this idea as it did with the idea of how Jesus could have two natures.

Their final conclusion goes something like this. Mary was not divine, not special in her own birth; she was an ordinary human girl, although holy and pure as a virgin. God caused something miraculous to happen inside Mary's womb, and the result was the birth of a person with two natures, human and divine. Jesus did not get one nature from his human mother and the other from his divine Father, as some have mistakenly believed at various points in Christian history. Both natures came from God alone, and both natures took up their home in the baby born to Mary.

And what about Mary? She was a simple, ordinary person, asked by God to take on a challenging role and accepting it in faith and humility. She cared for Jesus for his entire earthly life. The Son of God knew the love and nurture of a mother.

Mary herself, the council declared, was the mother of Jesus, and since the council declared that Jesus was God, Mary was to be known as the “God-bearer” [in Greek, the Theotokos or Θεοτόκος], the Mother of God. Not in the sense that  the eternal Father, creator of all the universe, including Mary herself, needed or could even have a mother, but in the sense that Immanuel, God-made-man, both needed and had an earthly mother. This fact explains why we honor Mary in such a special way in the Christian faith today.

On this Mother’s Day, we give thanks for our own mothers―those living among us, and those living in glory divine. We know, from personal experience, how important a mother’s love and nurture are to the lives of their children. We rejoice that Jesus, our brother, had a loving human mother to care for him, even as he hung on the cross. And we rejoice that God gave Mary to us as a woman with whom we may “share the glory of God’s eternal kingdom.” [Book of Common Prayer, page 243]

Through God’s actions in giving us Jesus, who is both human and divine, and in causing him to be born of his mother, Mary, the God-bearer, we have truly been given “a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” [I Peter 1:3] Amen!